Linking talent to value.

To understand how difficult it is for senior leaders to link their companies’ business and talent priorities, consider the blind spot of a CEO we know. When asked to identify the critical roles in his company, the CEO neglected to mention the account manager for a key customer, in part because the position was not prominent in any organization chart. By just about any other criterion, though, this was one of the most important roles in the company, critical to current performance and future growth. The role demanded a high degree of responsibility, a complex set of interpersonal and technical skills, and an ability to respond deftly to the client’s rapidly changing needs.

Yet the CEO was not carefully tracking the position. The company was unaware of the incumbent’s growing dissatisfaction with her job. And there was no succession plan in place for the role. When the incumbent account manager, a very high performer, suddenly took a job at another company, the move stunned her superiors. As performance suffered, they scrambled to cover temporarily, and then to fill, a mission-critical role.

Disconnects such as this between talent and value are risky business—and regrettably common. Gaining a true understanding of who your top talent is and what your most critical roles are is a challenging task. Executives often use hierarchy, relationships, or intuition to make these determinations. They assume (incorrectly, as we will explain) that the most critical roles are always within the “top team” rather than three, or even four, layers below the top. In fact, critical positions and critical people can be found throughout an organization (Exhibit 1).

Fortunately, there is a better way. Companies can more closely connect their talent and their opportunities to create value by using quantifiable measures to investigate their organizations’ nooks and crannies to find the most critical roles, whether they lie in design, manufacturing, HR, procurement, or any other discipline. They can define those jobs with clarity to ensure that top performers with the appropriate skills fill the roles. And they can put succession plans in place for each one.

The leaders at such companies understand that reallocating talent to the highest-value initiatives is as important as reallocating capital. This is not an annual exercise: it is a never-ending, highest-priority discipline. In a survey of more than 600 respondents, we found the talent-related practice most predictive of winning against competitors was frequent reallocation of high performers to the most critical strategic priorities. In fact, “fast” talent reallocators were 2.2 times more likely to outperform their competitors on total returns to shareholders (TRS) than were slow talent reallocators.